Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day025.12
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25
Q. Yes, but I think somewhere else in your report you admit
that we know virtually nothing. We still do not find any
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orders about extermination -- I do not want to turn up the
actual page, but I could, I suppose, find it, I
have flagged it -- and it struck me as odd that here we
are, 55 years down the road, and we are still floundering
in some respects. That is page 46, paragraph 16. Let us
go briefly back to there where you admit that we do not
know the answers. So do we know much more than we did in 1960?
A. Well, we have a lot more evidence.
Q. The state of contemporary research does not give
sufficient evidence, you say, and here we are at the
beginning of the 21st century?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, no, I think that is taking, if I may say
so, that particular little section right out of context.
A. Yes. I am referring here to the question whether the
deportation of Jews to the East was at this time already a
matter for the plan. What I am saying, I do not know.
The research does not allow us to make such a statement.
MR IRVING: So there are lots of areas where we still, even
after 60 years, cannot make a firm statement.
A. That is due to the fact that many of these decisions, you
know, were done obviously orally between, you know, Hitler
and Himmler. The Nazis systematically tried to destroy
the files concerning this question. As far as the files
are survived, they are scattered around Europe. We
actually have only access to Eastern European archives
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since a couple of years, so it is...
Q. Is that not a bit of a cop out, if I can use a phrase, to
say that the files have been destroyed and it was done
verbally between Hitler and Himmler? Is it not a bit of
an ausflugt?
A. No. Himmler said it himself in the speech. This is
history which has not been written and will never be
written. So they tried systematically to destroy the
evidence and to mislead the following generations
about ----
Q. Having said that, he then had the speech printed in
numerable copies and shown to every member of the SS
General Staff?
A. I replied this yesterday. It was not, it was a secret
speech. It was not planned to publish it. It was just to
have a copy available for internal use.
Q. Page 53, paragraph 1.3, please? We looked at this
document once or twice already. Do you agree that the
approval for the mass killing came from Heydrich and
Himmler, and that there is no evidence that Hitler himself
approved of this operation or, indeed, was even informed
of it?
A. I have only can refer to this document and if you read the
document, it is only a reference to Himmler.
Q. Yes.
A. And to Heydrich, of course.
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Q. And that if there had been these verbal discussions
between Himmler and Hitler that you refer to, this is the
kind of place you would have expected to find reference to
it between ----
A. Not necessarily.
Q. But if there had been general knowledge, and one can
assume that Gauleiter Greisler who has carried out this
special treatment of 100,000 Jews must have been wondering
at the back of his mind, "Is it OK what I am doing?" that
Himmler passed on to him the word, "Well, I have cleared
it with the boss"?
A. Well, Greisler obviously no difficulties to carry out this
task. He did not ask for this kind of approval and you
know that there were very rules about secrecy, and it was
not every -- it was not always necessary to mention the
name of Hitler in this or to call upon the authority of
Hitler in this ----
Q. Well, you say so, Dr Longerich, but, of course, Gauleiter
Greisler, as a Gauleiter, formally came under Hitler, did
he not, so where was Hitler in this equation? Here is
Greiser dealing direct with Himmler, saying, "I have done
what you and Heydrich have authorized", and there is no
mention of Hitler in the document?
A. No. There is no mentioning because Greiser was quite
prepared to carry out this, to carry out this task and he
assumed that Himmler had the authority to ask him to do
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so.
Q. Do you agree that Hitler did not order this operation
then, that the operation was ordered by Himmler and
Heydrich, as the document says?
A. I have no written evidence that Hitler ordered this
particular operation to kill these, to kill 100,000 in the
Warthegau area.
Q. If somebody says precisely the words you have just used,
would that make them a Holocaust denier?
A. Not this one sentence, no, of course not.
Q. The next page, please, paragraph 2.3, are you able to
identify any document in support of your assertion that
two districts were to take the lead in the implementation
of the Final Solution?
A. Well, this is mainly, if you look at the, if you look at
the history of the two extermination camps, at the two
extermination camps, Belzec, if you look at the history of
the extermination camp, Belzec, and if you look then, if
you go a little bit further, if you do not stop here, and
if you go a little bit further and look into spring 1942
and look at the deportation, what happened, then it is
quite clear that Belzec was particularly built for the
killing of the Jews who are labelled non-fit for work in
the district of Belzec and to a certain extent in the
district of Galicia.
Q. So once again you are extrapolating backwards from what
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happened to presume an order ----
A. Yes, but that is something that if you do not have a
complete, if you do not have a complete documentation,
this is what historians sometimes have to do. They have
to draw conclusion what, you know, actually from the
following sequence or they have to go back a little bit.
Q. That is what I have been saying for some weeks, in fact,
and obviously we share the same kind of methods ----
A. I am not sure about that.
Q. --- we do not always come up with the same conclusions.
Paragraph 2.4, the only sources that you quote for your
assertions about the events in East Galicia are the
testimony rendered in the 1968 trial and a secondary work
Ostgalizien by Pohl?
A. This is a dissertation published three years ago by a
colleague I know very much and I know very closely and,
I mean, I follow ----
Q. Just like Gerlach, the same kind of thing?
A. And this is a first case study about the killing of the
Jews of Eastern Galicia. There is a second book written
at the same time which came to the same conclusion written
by Zan Kuhlack, and I think I do not have to go to the
local archives in Galicia to prove that the Nazis killed
the Jews of Galicia. It is quite evident. These books
have been reviewed. These people have to confront
colleagues' criticism and conferences. I attended those
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conferences and I am of no doubt about their academic
qualifications, and I do not have to present, I think,
always first-hand evidence or documentary evidence for
something which is commonly acknowledged among historians
and is not disputed.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you dispute this, Mr Irving? Do you say
that this all made up by somebody?
MR IRVING: Well, the question I was going to ask is precisely
what he just answered. Is he able to identify any
documentary evidence in support of his allegations or is
it all second-hand?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but would you answer my question? Are
you disputing that these indiscriminate killings in
Galicia took place?
MR IRVING: Not in so many words.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, then let us move on.
MR IRVING: The purpose of asking these questions, of course,
is to establish, my Lord, the sometimes rather threadbare
evidence that this report is based on.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: But there is no point in saying evidence for
a proposition is threadbare if you accept the proposition.
MR IRVING: Well, I am accustomed to working with original
documents rather than with secondary and tertiary sources.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It would not make any difference if you had
the original documents because you accept what they show.
MR IRVING: 2.6, Dr Longerich, once again are you able to
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identify any document that records what Himmler and
Globocnik discussed at their meeting on October 13th,
other than, presumably, the Dienstkalender?
A. Yes, it is in the Dienst calendar, you have it in front of
you probably.
Q. They were just talking about the einfluss der Juden,
I suppose, or something like that?
A. Yes, and then there is the BBC file of Globocnik and there
is a very interesting exchange of letters, and you can
come to this conclusion if you read through that.
Q. And on the basis of those two sources, you then say: "It
is presumably at this meeting that Globocnik received the
assignment to build the Belzec extermination camp"?
A. Just one second, well, we know that they met and we know
that Globocnik from the internal correspondence of his
office in Lublin, we know that he was looking for more
radical solutions for the Jewish question. Then he met
Himmler and after that they started to build the
extermination camp of Auschwitz.
This is a typical, I mean, in this field we have
to rely, what we are trying to do, we are trying to
reconstruct the history of the decision-making process.
This means that because the evidence is sometimes or is
sometimes fragmented, we have to put together pieces and
have to draw conclusions from that.
Q. Yes.
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A. So it is not so easy, you do not have the daily or the
weekly records of the conversations between Himmler and
Hitler about the Holocaust. We have to use these bits and
pieces and put it together and to come to our
conclusions.
Q. Very interesting.
A. Of course, I made here, of course, these kind of
reservations when I am not absolutely sure that they
decided this day, it is an assumption based on documentary
evidence that they probably at this day as I think made
the decision to build an extermination camp for the
district of Lublin which then existed, and there were
people killed in this extermination camp which I think is
also part of the evidence.
Q. Now just a minor diversion here. Am I right in saying it
is a perfectly reasonable process as historian or writer
you get fragmentary documents, sometimes only half a line,
sometimes a scrap of handwriting. You add your own
knowledge, you add your experience, the 30 years you have
worked in the archives, your general body of information,
and on the basis of that you try to represent, in as
accurate and genuine a form as possible, what, on the
balance of probabilities, those fragments of information mean.
A. And you have to include, of course, every piece you find.
You cannot neglect anything.
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Q. Yes, but here you had very little that you could have
neglected, because your result said it is very
fragmentary, is it not?
A. Sometimes these things are very fragmentary.
Q. What I just described is the normal process of writing
history on the basis of very scant records?
A. If the record is fragmented, yes.
Q. Are you familiar with the writings of Jan Karski? I will
ask you about one particular one, page 56, paragraph 2.7.
Are you aware of the first report that a Polish emissary
called Jan Karski wrote? He gave it to the Polish
government in exile early 1940, in which he described a
visit in December 1939 to a transit camp for Jews at Belzec?
A. Yes. A camp existed at Belzec before this. There was a
large slave labour camp in Belzec before this time.
Belzec was just on the demarcation line between the Soviet
and the German sphere of influence in Poland. They
employed Jewish slave labour in 1939 and 1940 to build
what they called the Buchgraben, the fortification at the
river Buch. So there was a camp there and the living
conditions in the camp were quite horrid.
Q. Jan Karski describes this ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, before you go on about Mr Karski,
I had thought you accepted that at Belzec there were many
thousands, tens if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews
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killed by gassing. What is the point of putting that
Mr Karski took the view it was a transit camp?
MR IRVING: I am looking at the quality of the sources.
I appreciate this point. We will just concentrate on the
figures then. Is your primary source on Belzec Michael
Tregenza article published in the Wiener Library bulletin?
A. No, my primary source is the Belzec verdict in German the
court. Of course I am familiar with the article.
Q. It is in your footnote 259.
A. Yes, it refers to it but it refers first of all to
evidence from German court material.
Q. So you accepted in your footnote 259 that Tregenza is reliable?
A. No, I just quoted him here. The footnote is about an
attempt to reconstruct the history of the setting up of
Belzec. So I quoted here different statements from
actually people who participated, worked, who actually
built this up, and then I said in the footnote Tregenza as
well confirmed the statement. He accepted the statement
as a kind of additional source, but I am primarily relying
on the Polish workers who built there, and who gave us
evidence about the history of the camp itself.
Q. Have you disregarded anything that Tregenza wrote in his report?
A. I only referred, I think, to his article here. This does
not mean I accepted every line that he has written about
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the camp.
Q. So, if he had written a number of totally absurd
statements that would have implied to you that he had
never been anywhere near the place?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no doubt that Belzec was
constructed, is there?
MR IRVING: Unfortunately, he is the source for one million
being killed apparently?
A. No, not in my report.
Q. Do you endorse Tregenza's claim that more than a million
Jews were killed at Belzec?
A. We do not know the exact number. I think best estimations
were given in the German Belzec trial. They said between
500 and 600,000 people. So I would assume that the number
one million could be seen as exaggerated. I am only
quoting this article one time and, if he made an absurd
statement there, I would not quote the article of course.
Q. If he made a dozen absurd statements, would you have quoted it?
A. Please criticise me if I quote him. I think I only quoted
him one once and I only quoted that he actually confirms
these statements of documents which I found elsewhere.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to keep interrupting but, if I do
not understand, I may as well say so. You quote whatever
he is called, Tregenza, simply for the date when the
construction of Belzec started. You do not rely on him,
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as I understand it, am I right, Dr Longerich, for the
number killed there?
A. No, exactly.
Q. You rely on the German court documents for that and they
give a different figure. So why are we spending a long
time on whether he is a reliable witness?
MR IRVING: We are going to spend a short time. I could have
spent much longer describing all the absurd statements
which make it quite plain that Tregenza was never anywhere
near the place and that any reasonable historian, reading
Tregenza's report, would have disqualified that source
completely. Paragraph 2.8, page 57, your only source for
the claim that Globocnik had an assignment to kill the
Jews of the Lublin and Galicia districts is a secondary
work again, Pohl's Lublin?
A. I am stating here that Globocnik had not yet received the
order to prepare for the killing of all Jews in the
Generalgouvernement, so this is the key sentence here.
I came to the conclusion actually by looking at the
history of Belzec because Belzec was obviously too small,
put it this way, to kill all the Jews of the
Generalgouvernement. So I think in my attempt to
reconstruct events, Belzec was first of all designed to
kill the Jews non-fit for work in the district of Lublin,
and in the district of Galicia, but not the killing centre
for the whole Generalgouvernement. I came to this
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conclusion by looking actually at the size of this installation.
Q. In Belzec?
A. Belzec.
Q. So we do not have very much information on the size
anyway, do we? We are very ill informed about it.
A. Because these camps were destroyed systematically by the
Nazis at the end of the war.

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